Release
date:
|
September 22, 2017
|
Director:
|
Apoorva Lakhia
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Shraddha Kapoor, Siddhanth Kapoor, Ankur Bhatia, Priyanka Setia, Rajesh Tailang
Hindi
|
Sometimes real life
offers you more promotional opportunities than a marketing genius could
imagine. The Thane police’s arrest this week of underworld kingpin Dawood
Ibrahim’s brother Iqbal Kaskar on charges of running an extortion racket
against builders and others, could not have been more timely: it came just days
before today’s release of director Apoorva Lakhia’s Haseena Parkar, based on the life of Ibrahim’s late sister.
The eponymous film
takes us from the siblings’ impoverished childhood to his rise as a criminal,
his escape to Dubai, the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, the 1992-’93 Mumbai
riots, her ascent in the 1990s to the position of the dreaded Haseena Aapa, all
the way to this decade. The role of sutradhar
is played jointly by Parkar (Shraddha Kapoor) and public prosecutor Rohini
Satam (Priyanka Setia), during the former’s courtroom interrogation while she
is on trial for extortion in the near-present day. Some flashbacks come in the
form of Parkar’s answers, some come when we are allowed access to her memory
bank while she refuses to answer certain probing questions.
This is a true
story with staggering potential. As one character in the film says, “There have
been many Bhais in Bombay but only one Aapa.” Who was this woman who took to
organised crime in a way we usually associate with men? According to a recently
published profile in Hindustan Times,
Parkar muddied her hands after her husband Ismail was murdered by Arun Gawli’s
gang in 1991.Thereafter she apparently took “control of D-Company’s
operations in Mumbai” following which she “grabbed land, extorted money,
kidnapped, ordered killings...” Hers is an intriguing tale crying out to be
told.
Not this way
though. Notwithstanding the real life drama surrounding its release, Haseena Parkar is dull in the overall
analysis. The first half has promise with its atmospheric recreation of the
grubby Mumbai locality where one of the world’s most wanted men and his sister
spent their early years in financial struggle. The costumes, styling and
production design are effective, though I will leave it to experts on 1960s-80s
Mumbai to comment on the accuracy of the nitty gritty.
Kapoor is sweet for
the most part as the younger Parkar, mining her natural child-like charm to
portray her character’s youthful innocence – sweet enough that I am willing to
look past that irritating suhag raat
scene, and that other scene where a terrified Parkar rushes home to swab the
floor of her house, fearing the wrath, it seems, of her cleanliness-obsessed
spouse (an oddly inconsistent piece of writing considering that he comes across
as a sweetheart who treats his wife with love and affection until then). The
star’s brother Siddhanth Kapoor too makes an impression in the role of Dawood
Ibrahim, and Ankur Bhatia as Parkar’s husband is noticeable for his strapping
physique.
After a point
though, it is clear that the script is going nowhere as it avoids taking a
position on any of the parties involved. And so, the dominant image of Ibrahim
here is of a thoughtful elder brother, what we get of Parkar too is a
rose-tinted view, neither is projected as being particularly evil or culpable,
and the film does not offer a single bit of information or a new insight to
justify its take on them, nothing about the duo that you would not gather from
news reports and editorials. In fact, Haseena
Parkar is so gentle on its protagonists, that you might be forgiven for
assuming that they are/were amateur pickpockets and shoplifters, not hardened
criminals.
Following a series
of calls to a local police station after the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, Parkar
explodes in anger at one point. “Ek hafte
se unko waqt par khana milta hai ya nahin, mere bachche school tak sahi
salaamat pahunchte hai ya nahin, kuchh nahin pata, kyunki meri galti na honey
ke bavjood, main yahaan ke chakkar kaat rahi hoon (For an entire week now,
I have had no clue whether my kids are being fed or are getting to school safe
and sound, because despite being blameless I am being repeatedly summoned
here),” she yells at a senior policeman.
He yells back: “Chup! ... Ek hafta kya, ek mahina aana
padega agar bulaaoo toh. Blast ka ilzaam hai tumhare bhai par, koi deshbhakti
ke kaam ka nahin.” (Shut up! ... Why just one week? If I choose to summon
you for an entire month you had better come. Your brother is accused of bomb
blasts, not of executing a patriotic duty.)
This exchange
reminded me of a sequence
from a monumentally superior film, Onir’s I Am, in which a Kashmiri Muslim woman expresses her frustration at the
constant visits to her home by Army personnel, at which her Kashmiri Hindu
friend snaps back after listening to her complaints for a while, reminding her that her brother, who lives in the same
house is, after all, a surrendered terrorist. The implication, of course, being
that the Army’s eye on the family is justified. That scene in I Am, the build-up to it and what
follows unarguably rank among the most intelligently, sensitively written and
directed passages ever seen in a Hindi film. In Haseena Parkar though, the back
and forth between Parkar and the cop remain hanging there without offering the
viewer any food for thought.
As it rolls along, Haseena Parkar ends up being a staccato
narration of facts, rather than a story pulsating with life. Even while seeming
to state those facts, it uses kid gloves on the parties involved, with one
exception: Muslims are clearly identified as the initiators of the violence in
the Mumbai riots, after which blame is equally apportioned between communities –
the narrative is careful not to single out majority community leaders such as
Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena whose role in the riots is chronicled by the
Justice Srikrishna
Commission Report. I am not for a second saying
Muslims played no role in Mumbai 1992-93, I
am merely pointing out the cowardice in pinpointing Muslim culpability while
skipping any mention of how some prominent Hindu names, as per records, openly
incited mobs at the time. Why make a film on a prickly subject if you lack
courage to say it like it is almost every step of the way?
Early positives are
thus soon overshadowed in Haseena Parkar.
The film’s lack of nuance in places is painfully literal. When a character says
Parkar became an outlaw because she was tired of the fingerpointing she was
subjected to merely for being Ibrahim’s sister, the director feels the need to
actually show us a montage of people pointing fingers. Uff!
The court scenes
become boring too, as Satam makes allegations without presenting any evidence,
so that when at one point the defence lawyer asks, “Are you a lawyer or a news
reporter?” it feels like a slap in the face of good investigative journalists.
As the older Parkar,
Ms Kapoor is as bland as the screenplay. She tries to appear mature and
menacing, but the effort shows too much. Besides, it is almost amusing to see
the aging process being depicted by sticking ping pong balls inside each of her
cheeks (I’m kidding but you know what I mean), while her skin remains as smooth
as a baby’s bottom over several decades. After his initial spark, Mr Kapoor
gets little chance to show off his acting chops since Ibrahim fades into the
distant background.
The most
interesting part of the film comes right in the end when, accompanying the
closing credits, we get a sepia-tinted series of photographs of the real people
depicted in this story. Those pictures would have held far more meaning for us
though if Haseena Parkar had breathed
life into its characters. Sadly, we don't learn much more about them from
watching the film in its entirety, than if we had spent about two hours
scouring newspaper archives or just staring at those pics.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
CBFC Rating (India):
|
UA
|
Running time:
|
124 minutes
|
This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: Epigram Digital PR
No comments:
Post a Comment